Port Mortuary (2010)

9

The directorate of what officially is called the Cambridge Forensic Center and Port Mortuary is on the top floor, and I have discovered that it is difficult to tell people how to find me when a building is round.

The best I’ve been able to do on the infrequent occasions I’ve been here is to instruct visitors to get off the elevator on the seventh floor, take a left, and look for number 111. It’s only one door down from 101, and to comprehend that 101 is the lowest room number on this floor and 111 is the highest requires some imagination. My office suite, therefore, would occupy a corner at the end of a long hallway if there were corners and long hallways, but there aren’t. Up here there is just one big circle with six offices, a large conference room, the reading room for voice-recognition dictation, the library, the break room, and in the center a windowless bunker where Lucy chose to put the computer and questioned documents lab.

Walking past Marino’s office, I stop outside 111, what he calls CENTCOM for Central Command. I’m sure Marino came up with the pretentious appellation all on his own, not because he thinks of me as his commander but rather he’s come to think of himself as answering to a higher patriotic order that is close to a religious calling. His worship of all things military is new. It’s just one more thing that is paradoxical about him, as if Peter Rocco Marino needs yet another paradox to define his inconsistent and conflicted self.

I need to calm down about him, I say to myself as I unlock my heavy door with its titanium veneer. He isn’t so bad and didn’t do anything so terrible. He’s predictable, and I shouldn’t be surprised in the least. After all, who understands him better than I do? The Rosetta stone to Marino isn’t Bayonne, New Jersey, where he grew up a street fighter who became a boxer and then a cop. The key to him isn’t even his worthless alcoholic father. Marino can be explained by his mother first and foremost, and then his childhood sweetheart Doris, now his ex-wife, both women seemingly docile and subservient and sweet but not harmless. Not hardly.

I push buttons to turn on the flush-mount lighting built into the struts of the geodesic glass dome that is energy-efficient and reminds me of Buckminster Fuller every time I look up. Were the famed architect-inventor still among the living, he would approve of my building and possibly of me but not of our morbid raison d’etre, I suspect, although at this stage of things I would have a few quibbles with him, too. For example, I don’t agree with his belief that technology can save us. Certainly, it isn’t making us more civilized, and I actually think the opposite is true.

I pause on gunmetal-gray carpet just inside my doorway as if waiting for permission to enter, or maybe I’m hesitant because to appropriate this space is to embrace a life I’ve rather much put off for the better part of two years. If I’m honest about it I should say I’ve put it off for decades, since my earliest days at Walter Reed, where I was minding my own business in a cramped, windowless room of AFIP headquarters when Briggs walked in without knocking and dropped an eight-by-eleven gray envelope on my desk with CLASSIFIED stamped on it.

December 4, 1987. I remember it so vividly I can describe what I was wearing and the weather and what I ate. I know I smoked a lot that day and had several straight Scotches at the end of it because I was excited and horrified. The case of all cases, and the DoD wanted me, picked me over all others. Or more accurately, Briggs did. By spring of the following year, I was discharged from the air force early, not on good behavior but because the Reagan administration wanted me gone, and I left under certain conditions that are shameful and cause pain even now. It is karmic that I find myself in a building of circles. Nothing has ended or begun in my life. What was far away is right next to me. Somehow it’s all the same.

The most blatant sign of my six-month absence from a position I’ve yet to really fill is that Bryce’s adjoining administrative office is comfortably cluttered while mine is empty and stark. It feels forlorn and lonely in here, my small conference table of brushed steel bare, not even a potted plant on it, and when I inhabit a space there are always plants. Orchids, gardenias, succulents, and indoor trees, such as areca and sago palms, because I want life and fragrances. But what I had in here when I moved in is gone and has been gone, overwatered and too much fertilizer. I gave Bryce detailed instructions and three months to kill everything. It took him less than two.

There is virtually nothing on my desk, a bow-shaped modular work station constructed of twenty-two-gauge steel with a black laminate surface and a matching hutch of file drawers and open shelves between expansive windows overlooking the Charles and the Boston skyline. A black granite countertop behind my Aeron chair runs the length of the wall and is home to my Leica Laser Microdissection System and its video displays and accoutrements, and nearby is my faithful back-up Leica for daily use, a more basic laboratory research microscope that I can operate with one hand and without software or a training seminar. There isn’t much else, no case files in sight, no death certificates or other paperwork for me to review and initial, no mail, and very few personal effects. I decide it’s not a good thing to have such a perfectly arranged, immaculate office. I’d rather have a landfill. It’s peculiar that being faced with an empty work space should make me feel so overwhelmed, and as I seal Erica Donahue’s letter in a plastic bag I finally realize why I’m not a fan of a world that is fast becoming paperless. I like to see the enemy, stacks of what I must conquer, and I take comfort in reams of friends.

I’m locking the letter in a cabinet when Lucy silently appears like an apparition in a voluminous white lab coat she wears for its warmth and what she can conceal beneath it, and she’s also fond of big pockets. The oversized coat makes her seem deceptively nonthreatening and much younger than her years, in her low thirties is the way she puts it, but she’ll forever be a little girl to me. I wonder if mothers always feel that way about their daughters, even when the daughters are mothers themselves, or in Lucy’s case, armed and dangerous.

She probably has a pistol tucked into the back waistband of her cargo pants, and I realize how selfishly happy I am that she’s home. She’s back in my life, not in Florida or with people I have to force myself to like. Manhattan prosecutor Jaime Berger is included in this mix. As I look at my niece, my surrogate only child, walking into my office, I can’t avoid a truth I won’t tell her. I’m glad if she and Jaime have called it quits. That’s really why I haven’t asked about it.

“Is Benton still with you?” I inquire.

“He’s on the phone.” She shuts the door behind her.

“Who’s he talking to at this hour?”

Lucy takes a chair, pulling her legs up on the seat, crossing them at the ankles. “Some of his people,” she says, as if to imply he’s talking to colleagues at McLean, but that’s not it. Anne is handling the hospital, and she and Marino are there and getting started on the scan. Why would Benton be talking to them or anyone else at McLean?

“It’s just the three of us, then,” I comment pointedly. “Except for Ron, I assume. But if you want the door shut, I suppose that’s fine.” It’s my way of letting her know that her hypervigilant and secretive behavior isn’t lost on me and I wish she would explain it. I wish she would explain why she feels it necessary to be evasive if not blatantly untruthful to me, her aunt, her almost-mother, and now her boss.

“I know.” She slides a small evidence pillbox out of her lab coat pocket.

“You know? What do you know?”

“That Anne and Marino went to McLean because you want an MRI. Benton filled me in. Why didn’t you go?”

“I’m not needed and wouldn’t be particularly helpful, since MR scans aren’t my specialty.” There is no MRI scanner at Dover’s port mortuary, where most bodies are war casualties and are going to have metal in them. “I thought I’d take care of a few things, and when I’m satisfied I know what I’m looking for, I’ll get started on the autopsy.”

“Kind of a backward way to look at things, when you stop to think about it,” Lucy muses, her eyes green and intensely fixed on me. “It used to be you did the autopsy so you knew what you were looking for. Now it’s just a confirmation of what you already know and a means of collecting evidence.”

“Not exactly. I still get surprises. What’s in the box?”

“Speaking of.” She slides the small white box across the unobstructed surface of my ridiculously clean desk. “You can take it out and don’t need gloves. But be careful with it.”

Inside the box on a bed of cotton is what looks like the wing of an insect, possibly a fly.

“Go ahead, touch it,” Lucy encourages, leaning forward in her chair, her face bright with excitement, as if she’s watching me open a gift.

I feel the stiffness of wire struts and a thin transparent membrane, something like plastic. “Artificial. Interesting. What is this exactly, and where did you get it?”

“You familiar with the holy grail of flybots?”